Volumes of work

Vladimir Liberzon R&D Director| Spider Project Team Moscow, Russian Federation

In construction and manufacturing duration of most activities depends on volume (quantity) of work to be done measured in physical units (meters, tons, pieces)..
When assigned resources productivity becomes known activity duration is calculated.
Most norms and estimates are applied to the volumes and volume units like unit costs, material requirements per volume unit, resource productivity as volume per hour, etc.
We plan volumes, we measure volumes, and changing volumes (for example entering actual data) we automatically change all corresponding data (remaining activity duration, cost, material consumption) for scheduling and budgeting of remaining works.
We calculate project schedules and budgets basing on activity volumes.

People frequently ask me why and how project managers schedule and manage their projects using tools that do not use volumes as one of activity properties?
Do you know an answer to this simple question?

Posted: Dec 18, 2019 10:21 AM

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Vladimir Liberzon R&D Director| Spider Project Team Moscow, Russian Federation

Dec 20, 2019 8:01 AM

Replying to Wade Harshman

...

I see nothing wrong with adding it as a field to software.

I would only caution new project managers that it is an incomplete metric.

Yes, it is incomplete metric because activity duration and cost depends not only on the activity volume but also on the resources assigned to do the work.

Posted: Dec 20, 2019 11:32 AM

Vladimir Liberzon R&D Director| Spider Project Team Moscow, Russian Federation

Dec 20, 2019 7:51 AM

Replying to Steve Ratkaj

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Vladimir;

This is very interesting to see different perspectives, and ways of doing things. Keep the conversation going as I would like to see more details about how "volumes" of work are tracked. As I was doing some simple analysis last week, for example, in global terms for one project that lasted 15 years (yes, that it the norm here), for an average of 20 office staff on the project, that translated into over 500,000 hrs of work. I would like to further break this down to have a better understanding of "productivity". This is because, all of our projects (hundreds) follow the same internal "norms" or project approval processes/ phases/ gates.

When the project lasts that long we always apply rolling wave planning.
For detailed part of the project we use detailed planning with resource assignment and leveling, volumes of work and resource productivity, etc. For the rest duration estimates are sufficient until enough data will become known,
I don't expect that this discussion will go into details. So if you will have specific questions ask them directly.

Posted: Dec 20, 2019 11:35 AM (Updated by author: Dec 20, 2019 1:38 PM)

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Volumes of work

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